How Big Data Became So Big – Unboxed – NYTimes.com

How big data became the new marketing term for businesses, in contrast to some of the dryer terminology like ‘data mining’, ‘business intelligence’ and ‘data analytics’. Quote:

IT may seem marketing gold, but Big Data also carries a darker connotation, as a linguistic cousin to the likes of Big Brother, Big Oil and Big Government.

“If only inadvertently, it does have a sinister flavor to it,” says Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.

Big Data’s enthusiasts say the rewards far outweigh the risks. Still, smart technologies that promise to observe, record and make inferences about human behavior as never before should prompt some second thoughts — both from the people building those technologies and from the people using them.